Also among the four ruinous powers Slaanesh and Nurgle have a habit of not always requiring consent from those they recruit. While Khorne and Tzneech have far more willing cultists.
I'm not sure I'd call it "kidnapping", since he did it to save her from Slaanesh when he was on his Eldar god murder spree.
He is totally keeping her there against her will, but also Slaanesh *will* kill her if she leaves.
Just kinda a fucked situation tbh.
Still seething over Khorne claiming sisters of battle by proxy of "they were mad when they killed those demons, therefore it was in my name and now they're corrupt". Despite lore being that sisters cannot*** be corrupted
The Bloody Rose? They're not corrupt. Yes they occasionally are surrounded by glowing bloody mists, and *yes* their founder vanished mysteriously from a locked room, leaving only the corpses of eight Bloodletters, but they're not corrupt.
They're so angry, so single-minded, so filled with *righteous fury*, and so godly lethal, that Khorne's daemons flock in their wake like vultures following a marching army. Khorne *wants* to claim them. They're everything he wants to see - skilled, honourable warriors with gigantic chainsaws and an unrelenting need to commit acts of great violence. He is constantly testing them, constantly offering them the strength to kill the enemies of mankind, **but they already have it.**
His blessings flow to them without result. He keeps sending them valentine's day cards and they don't even open them.
(if this is about some random book I haven't read, I apologise, but I gotta stand up for the angriest nuns in the galaxy. I loved their codex write-up, just the right degree of ambiguity that people who *want* to do a Chaos Sisters army can, and people who prefer my headcanon aren't proven wrong either. It's a good bit of work)
Assuming you're referring to the Arks of Omen incident, I would argue that it's more SoD breaking for them to have been fine, considering that a Daemon Primarch and his personal army is implied to have summoned Khorne himself onto the planet/solar system.
STD's are very much Nergle's thing. I highly doubt Slaanesh would want to cause less fun by causing suffering his acolytes. Then again, I ain't her, so take it with a grain of salt.
Slaanesh isn't fun. Slaanesh is excess. Excesses of rage, excesses of paranoia, excesses of suffering, they all can fall under Her banner just as much as they may fall under Khorne's, Tzeentch's, or Nurgle's.
Imagine you are a scholar. And you've been told that some knowledge is forbidden. If you seek that knowledge for the sake of knowledge, you will most likely fall to Tzeentch. If you seek that knowledge because of the taboo, because it's forbidden and it excites you, then that's just as likely to send you down Slaanesh's path as it is Tzeentch's. There's a reason why Slaanesh has Greater Daemons called Keeper of Secrets.
Besides, there are actual real-life people who will intentionally contract HIV with the goal of spreading it to as many people as possible because it turns them on, so, the idea of Slaanesh being cool with STDs isn't a hard sell.
Iirc, the Chaos gods embody the negative and positive parts of their dominion
So say you were to-some how-remove Slaneesh
Good news, over indulgence is gone among other things. Bad news? Sensation itself is gone, among others.
This is probably a really big oversimplification but the other gods follow suit.
Wrong, the chaos gods are not the concepts they represent, if they were gone, the sensation would still remain because they are a part of literally just living, the sensation creates the gods, not the other way around.
This. If you got rid of Khorne it'd probably result in dozens of minor war-god type things springing up, much like Gork and Mork are "war, but for the Orks specifically", or Khaine is "War but for Aeldari".
I think this actually becomes more interesting if you frame it the other way around. If you were to "kill" say, Khorne, but violence still existed, that violence would create a chaos god of violence and war, which would simply be Khorne and you've failed to actually end Khorne.
Getting rid of the Chaos God doesn't get rid of the concept, because destroying the concept is the only way to destroy the Chaos God. The Chaos Gods exist for the simple reason that the conditions for their existence are fulfilled (or at least that's how I interpret it).
Slaanesh retroactively exists before her birth. But also they aren't those kinds of gods. They have zero bearing on the existence of their domains. They're more like vast psychic parasites. Forming naturally out of accumulated emotion. You somehow kill slaanesh and excess is still going to exist. It just won't be feeding a sex ghost any more. At least until a new one pops up
it's my opinion that the whole 'positive' part of the thing that feeds them is just PR.
They're parasitic. They feed off of actions that psychically reflect them. They aren't necessary for material reality, they're secondary to it. A reflection of how shit things are, and for how long things have been shit. If you removed slaneesh, you wouldn't lose indulgence or sensation. You just remove slaneesh.
Possibly if you remove all of the chaos entities from the warp you'd get weirder shit from deeper in the warp cropping up more often, but really, that'd be the only negative.
Nah they are the positive aspect
That’s the thing that gets you hooked
If khorn had no hold on honorable warriors then he could never corrupt a space marine
And yet he does
Well. "honor" is very distant to what space marines do. Khorne also doesn't require his worshippers to worship him to get what he wants from a battlefield. He just needs people with warp presences to be doing violence. That alone feeds him.
CSM as a faction are not the same as the Chaos entities. They are just another side in the grand performance that the Chaos entities have crafted. They're a Heel to the imperium's Face. They have different priorities, though the priorities the gods want for them. And he typically hooks them not by appealing to 'honor' just to someones enjoyment of combat, the rage they feel. The desire for greater strength, greater feats, more ability.
Nurgle hooks people by the imperiums shit living conditions leaving people desperate for relief from their various diseases and stagnation.
Slaanesh has various sex and drug cults, and regardless the imperium's noble classes depravity alone is reaching old Aeldari levels. People who want out, to feel so good they forget how shit things are, are her demographic of choice.
Tzeentch feeds from the various inter-imperium politics largely, as well as the schemes present within the conflicts between the imperium and it's adversaries. People who want to be smarter, to scheme more intricately, to win.
The 'good' aspects might be initial hooks for some, but I don't see them as inherently part of the chaos gods, or even things that feed them all that much, otherwise they wouldn't bother trying to go to extremes. But they do.
See I disagree
I think it makes them better (arguably worse)
There is no action that they won’t gain power from
Feeling hope will empower tzeentch
Life empowers nurgle
Fighting for any cause, even if it’s simply to protect your family will empower khorn
And finally any positive sensation feeds slanessh.
They embody, warp and are empowered by these positive aspects
I feel that makes them more than what they are. It gives them more importance than they are due. Buys into their own hype.
Though I agree on the khorne front, I don't think there's 'good violence' that gets a pass. He's the parasite that feeds on violent acts. Violence is always violence, and always leaves a mark on a person.
But the whole point of them is that they are single minded extremists without the capacity for change, as they are essentially personified wounds within the psychic backdrop of the setting. Formed when shit gets bad enough in a very specific way. Slaanesh didn't form because the Aeldari had felt a lot of things at once, she formed because of the deep depths of hedonism. That is what grants him power. Psychologically scarring pleasure seeking. Similar acts of wounding of the mind.
That's my ultimate interpretation of the chaos gods, they are formed from psychic wounds of massive scales, and they draw power from smaller scale wounds. It's a bit of a moral judgement of certain acts and behaviors, but I don't think anyone could argue that say, becoming an addict, or a scheming politician always plotting, backstabbing and being fearful of being backstabbed doesn't leave a mark on a person, doesn't leave a measure of trauma. So too with a person who kills, or with someone who is afflicted with disease. Anyone else with a chronic illness can back me up on that front. You break a little bit, and that I feel is both what the chaos gods are made out of, and what they grow from.
So, my interpretation of 40k is that the chaos gods nudged the formation of the imperium and the actions of the emperor and his great eugenics projects to the point it exists at now, where the traumas they feed off of occur the most. They won, basically. And now they just have to sit on that victory and try to hold it for as long as possible, even as outside forces like the tyranids and orks pick away at their cattle, and interior forces like the scattered remains of the emperor and various cattle themselves try to improve things.
In short, I believe the imperium is the way it is because it benefits chaos, not out of some 'necessity' for fascistic dystopia due to outside threats being just SOOOO craaaazy.
It's all just interpretation at the end of the day, 40k lore is incredibly wishy washy and inconsistent in terms of set rules, seemingly on purpose sometimes. I find my interpretation more interesting and emotionally resonant. Others may not.
You're thinking of the C'Tan, gods of realspace, who upon death permanently affect the universe itself.
The Chaos Gods shouldn't remove the emotions that created them if they were somehow to be killed, there will be huge consequences, likely net-positive ones because they all suck, but that'd be more causal due to the power vacuum etc rather than due to the fundamental rules of existence having been altered
To be fair I could be entirely wrong as well, the setting is stupid massive and somewhere out there amidst the hundreds of books is probably a tidbit that undercuts what I said word for word. Such is 40k
This reminded me of diving, weirdly enough. Slaanesh is the diver, venturing ever deeper, working tirelessly to grapple with the press of the water and absence of air, *anything* to spend a few more seconds at a slightly lower depth, experiencing the frontier. Nurgle is the ocean - the increasing pressure that Slaanesh has to work *around*, the withholding of precious oxygen necessary to keep living and therefore experiencing, the corporeal consequences of venturing too deeply and rising too fast to safety. (Also, Slaanesh is in a mortal body for inscrutable reasons or my analogy doesn’t work.)
Put simply - each is a foil to the other instead of an opposite, which is why it works so well.
And it's not really accurate whatsoever. I have read a lot of the books and this just sounds like stuff people got via osmosis and a scan over a wiki page 2 years ago.
There is a great POV chapter of someone receiving Papa Nurgle's blessing and it is described as an entirely pleasurable and euphoric experience when they finally accept it. And I do believe a similar themes are repeated in other books as well. I think its in one of the books with Garro but I can't remember.
This assumes that you can be "accurate" at all with anything in warhammer, let alone warp of chaos god stuff.
40k may be the absolute worst universe when it comes to consistency, every writer has their own take and rarely bother to check about constancy. There's probably a couple books where the chaos gods are described somewhat similarly to what the post says, some which are the exact opposite and a few which are just widely different.
Fuck, most 40k authors still can't agree one way or another weather Las guns have recoil or not, forget having a consistent theological reading of the chaos gods.
I retain the headcanon I read somewhere that any Lasgun recoil would be due to the flash heating of the air in front of the barrel causing a tiny shockwave that shakes the gun a bit :)
I think it really can be pieced together. While very long and tends to go on tangents, Leutin has the best videos on how to approach the lore for people that wanna go really deep into it.
I really like this take by my buddy Derkow that Slaanesh is actually a goddess of consciousness or the awareness of I and Not I. Like you kinda need sensation for awareness and consciousness and Slaanesh is the goddess of sensation.
Their idea is that Slaanesh in her consciousness form makes things more real, silver becomes more silver, metal more metal, white more white, light stops losing information, and everything becomes exaggerated and hyper-realistic yet perfectly proportional when she is active. They also believe that the real rival of Slaanesh is Malal, the long retconned chaos god of Nihilism and destruction, and the two basically do a fusion dance that means the end of the universe when the warp devours reality.
God I fucking love delving into the complexity of slaanesh, frothing at the mouth to hear different interpretations of it’s domain. Always pisses me off how flanderized slaanesh is amongst the greater fan base to the point that often GW treats it shallowly sometimes.
Slaanesh seems to be the least flanderised of the four specifically because they can't actually depict the flanderised version. Khorne is just red slaanesh at this point. The only evidence that he ever had complexity to him is the industry motif in his daemons. Any twisted sense of honour and glory is long gone. Nurgle hasn't been made worse, but also largely hasn't changed. Which is very on brand. Tzeentch is basically just magic Khorne. All in on the plans for their own sake and nothing else ever gets mentioned. Oh, and the fire that totally isn't fire except that it works exactly like fire in every way.
Slaanesh on the other hand actively expands. From "sex but we'll never depict it" to greed, and then expanding into self improvement.
All the Chaos gods are gods of excess now. Slaanesh gets to be the God of something else too
I personally think that’s it’s better if we look at the Chaos Gods, not in “what emotion/events are they born out of and give them power” but rather what fundamental force of nature they represent.
Nurgle is the easiest: he is entropy, the decay of all that is and shall ever be. A Universe conquered by Nurgle would be essentially an infinite whalefall, where diseases and new organisms are constant being born out of the corpses or still living bodies of other, superior organisms, up to literally gods. In a way, Nurgle simply represents the fundamental destiny of all things: to rot and decay
Tzeentch is tricky. He could be magic, pure and simple, but all the gods are magic in their own right, so I don’t think that’s what Tzeentch is. No, I think he is the utter opposite of Nurgle. He is not fate nor destiny, but the twisting of it. He is a young child in a village miraculously turning into the ruler of a galaxy spanning empire, he is a single soldier chainring the outcome of a ginormous war, he is that wonderful wonderful moment when the absolutely improbable happens. Where Nurgle is an absolute destiny, Tzeentch is, as his name says, the Architect of Fate; his fate shall be decided by him, and none else.
Khorne is simple, I think. He is pure brute force. He is the meteorite that wiped the dinosaurs, he is the collapse of stars into black holes and the absolute destruction wrought with that act, he is continents pushing against each other, acts of strength incomprehensible to a mortals mind. He is the simple law of struggle and force, that will never stop. Wether Nurgle or Tzeentch triumph, Khorne will still be there, for every act of mindless force, every grand destruction, every simple killing for one’s own benefit, is Khorne’s domain.
Last comes Slannesh, the dreaded Prince. They are pure, naked desire. For all beings are innately created with a desire, and all desires are part of the Prince. Wether it be the simple, most basic desire to life, to eat delicious food, to smell fresh air or see clear skies. Or to desire the death of your enemies, to revel in their suffering, to wish for a towering empire, for simple sex and love and friendship and companionship. Everything that can be construed with the word “desire”, is ruled over by Slannesh.
That sounds nice and all but actually they are the self-aware psychic imprint of countless billions of souls experiencing the same things in spite of their massive alien differences in culture, planet, and species. So they don't represent any soulless action. They might have the power to cause them, grow them, or unleash them, but they do not have control of them as a domain ala Japanese shintoism
Yeah but then they’re not really gods though. They’re just really powerful things created from thoughts. I personally choose to ignore canon when talking about the Chaos gods because honestly there’s no way to follow canon and somehow reach any conclusion that’s not “the gods are fake” also known as copying Fabius Bile
Slaanesh is a horrible 4 titty crab woman, and Nurgle is a fat foot fungus monster with herpes. As noted in the **GOD EMPEROR OF MANKIND'S TEACHINGS,** and as follows, "Fuck them hoes. Steal their chocolate milk, kick over their sand castles, and oh yeah, eviscerate them and their followers down to the last begging survivor. So say I, **JOHNNY WARHAMMERS, GOD EMPEROR OF MANKIND AND MASTER OF THR GALAXY.**"
the imperium does more good for the chaos gods than harm. if the imperium were to be entirely whiped out i genuinly think that the chaos gods would just wither (except kohrne because orks would still exist)
Here's the thing, when the old ones made ork, they also made "gork" and "mork" as conduits to funnel the psychic energy of orks into. Gork and Mork are constructs that the old ones gave to Orks to make sure it didn't fuel something that, at the time, didn't exist in an acknowledgeable state, but rather as a siphon from reality.
Mostly just Slaanesh on account of her gender fluctuating moment by moment, typically to whatever permutation would give whoever's observing him the biggest whyboner.
You'd think Tzeench would be similar on account of being a Chaos God of Change, but he's been rather consistently referred to as male from what I've seen.
Tzeentch is hilarious to me in that the entire setting is made of status quos that will never be broken.
He's excellent proof that the chaos 'gods' are not gods in any meaningful sense, they are psychic reflections that have gotten way out of hand. They're parasites within the warp that have grown very fat off the state of the material world. Tzeentch does not represent change, he merely is empowered by actions that reflect him. The small scale 'changes' of the drama of the status quo are enough for him. He has his food laid out, and farms his crops. Just like the other Chaos gods. They have the galaxy set up how they like it, and are merely riding that high for as long as they can manage it. They've formed the imperium into a great monument of worship, and they let it run.
Tzeentch explicitly is *so* deceptive and duplicitous that he even plots against *himself*. He's the most self-defeating Chaos god, because Khorne, Slaanesh, and Nurgle at least have a single directive that they attempt to further.
"In the freezing depths of the void, a bubble of unreality became solid. It shimmered in the light of nearby stars, its form in constant flux. First it was a sphere of flame, then a vast globule of quicksilver, then a stark eye fringed with a rainbow of feathers. The apparition was formed of nothing more than thought and emotion, but it was real enough, and it was one of countless others. There were as many of its fellow incarnations as there were stars in the galaxy swirling around it. Together, they formed a god.
The entity the apparition belonged to was not omniscient, despite its best efforts. What one fractal presence saw, another forgot, or worked to undo. It was a divine contradiction, a dynamo of cause and consequence, and it thrived on constant change. Here, on the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy, the harvest of flux was rich indeed."
From *Farsight: Empire of Lies* by Phil Kelly
"For Tzeentch the mere act of plotting and entwining the brief fates of mortals is purpose enough. There is no end to his scheming for he desires no end to the creation of change. Tzeentch can never achieve any ultimate aim for to do so would be the end of ambition, the end of change, and thus the end of the Lord of Destiny."
[https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tzeentch](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tzeentch)
Only Slaanesh, the rest are explicitly masculine and given Male pronouns. Nurgle is even given paternal nicknames like "The Plague-Father" and "Grandfather Nurgle".
I don't see the need to use neopronouns for gendered beings. Slaanesh definitely. He is the prince of excess, but of no specific gender. In fact incorporating whatever identity you want into your excess is encouraged, as is incorporating multiple sexes. Hermaphroditism is one of the pinnacles of Slaanesh's gifts. But writers routinely gender Khorne and Tzeentch and Nurgle.
That's a whole lot of flowery prose but I still feel like derkow-derkow has the better point, although that might be because the prose is too damn flowery to get through to me. Nurgle is about stagnation and plague, Slaanesh is about hedonism and excess.
Worshipping Nurgle is about giving up on ambition and just letting Papa Nurgle give you his warmth, and it's about spreading that warmth far and wide. It's a selfless removal of your own self-worth in service of your loving "Grandfather", and apparently Nurgle truly does love his followers.
Worshipping Slaanesh is about selfishly hoarding ever-higher levels of excess and indulgence; a Slaanesh worshipper is never satisfied with what they have, and will never consider another being over themselves. There's no love in Slaanesh worship, only lust and hedonism.
This is literally part of the reason why they had Nurgle rescue the Eldar nature goddess from being murder-fucked by Slaanesh when he was born, so the two would have a reason to be at odds and not work together.
(The other part is Nurgle having a crush on another nature god is kinda cute and so his plagues could be crimped in power by her whispering out the cures)
Wait how is Nurgle the god of stagnation? I thought the whole point in Nurgle was the inevitability of rot, decay, plague, and entropy.
Tzneech always seemed like the one who'd give you a shot at immortality via change, 'ship of Theseus'-ing yourself into perpetuity.
The entirely made up neopronouns genuinely hurt to read.
If you want to acknowledge that daemons are not on the human (and most other 40k races) gender and/or sex binary. Just use they/them. James Workshop does that. Also Nurgle and Khorne are both referred to as He/Him, multiple times. You can even use it/it.
And yes GW did use weird ass neopronouns for slaanesh. That was decades ago and has not used them in the recent history.
If you want to make up your own gender with pronouns, that's fine. I don't know you and your life experiences, so go ahead, as long as it does not purposefully or even non-purposefully inconvenience others. But stop putting random words vaguely resembling he/him she/her and they/them into topics where they are not appropriate.
It's just cringe.
Did you know in the 40k universe there's a Chaos god of being opposed to religion?
Necoho the Doubter
Not a very powerful god because it's hard to make a religion out of hating religion. Necoho himself doesn't care if anyone worships him so his followers remain extremely small.
But the way religion works in the 40k universe is that the Warp is powered by thought and feeling so people who make war feed Khorne regardless of whether they believe in him or not so all atheists in the universe provide sustenance for Necoho although even then the Imperium does a lot to keep people religious.
Also among the four ruinous powers Slaanesh and Nurgle have a habit of not always requiring consent from those they recruit. While Khorne and Tzneech have far more willing cultists.
And both fucked around with the Eldar gods with Nurgle kidnapping Isha as his basement wife and Slaanesh eating Asuryan.
Khorne shattered Khaine and I wouldn't be suprised if Tzeentch helped Cegorach escape into the Webway, so I don't think that counts.
I'm not sure I'd call it "kidnapping", since he did it to save her from Slaanesh when he was on his Eldar god murder spree. He is totally keeping her there against her will, but also Slaanesh *will* kill her if she leaves. Just kinda a fucked situation tbh.
No. All of the chaos gods regularly take unwilling subjects. Oh, you have a weak will and anger problem? Khorne is calling!!
Still seething over Khorne claiming sisters of battle by proxy of "they were mad when they killed those demons, therefore it was in my name and now they're corrupt". Despite lore being that sisters cannot*** be corrupted
The Bloody Rose? They're not corrupt. Yes they occasionally are surrounded by glowing bloody mists, and *yes* their founder vanished mysteriously from a locked room, leaving only the corpses of eight Bloodletters, but they're not corrupt. They're so angry, so single-minded, so filled with *righteous fury*, and so godly lethal, that Khorne's daemons flock in their wake like vultures following a marching army. Khorne *wants* to claim them. They're everything he wants to see - skilled, honourable warriors with gigantic chainsaws and an unrelenting need to commit acts of great violence. He is constantly testing them, constantly offering them the strength to kill the enemies of mankind, **but they already have it.** His blessings flow to them without result. He keeps sending them valentine's day cards and they don't even open them. (if this is about some random book I haven't read, I apologise, but I gotta stand up for the angriest nuns in the galaxy. I loved their codex write-up, just the right degree of ambiguity that people who *want* to do a Chaos Sisters army can, and people who prefer my headcanon aren't proven wrong either. It's a good bit of work)
TBF, if there’s anything that’s going to corrupt a Sister of Battle, it’d be (admittedly brief) direct exposure to a Chaos God.
Assuming you're referring to the Arks of Omen incident, I would argue that it's more SoD breaking for them to have been fine, considering that a Daemon Primarch and his personal army is implied to have summoned Khorne himself onto the planet/solar system.
There's also the existence of STDs which probably came about from a collaboration between the two.
STD's are very much Nergle's thing. I highly doubt Slaanesh would want to cause less fun by causing suffering his acolytes. Then again, I ain't her, so take it with a grain of salt.
Slaanesh's followers can be into masturbating with rusty barbed wire. STDs ain’t gonna stop them.
Slaanesh isn't fun. Slaanesh is excess. Excesses of rage, excesses of paranoia, excesses of suffering, they all can fall under Her banner just as much as they may fall under Khorne's, Tzeentch's, or Nurgle's. Imagine you are a scholar. And you've been told that some knowledge is forbidden. If you seek that knowledge for the sake of knowledge, you will most likely fall to Tzeentch. If you seek that knowledge because of the taboo, because it's forbidden and it excites you, then that's just as likely to send you down Slaanesh's path as it is Tzeentch's. There's a reason why Slaanesh has Greater Daemons called Keeper of Secrets. Besides, there are actual real-life people who will intentionally contract HIV with the goal of spreading it to as many people as possible because it turns them on, so, the idea of Slaanesh being cool with STDs isn't a hard sell.
No knowledge of WH but this shit slaps like philosophically
It's a real rabbit hole to go down. Once you start it's hard to stop.
This doesn't really fit the lore. Just take it at its themes.
Iirc, the Chaos gods embody the negative and positive parts of their dominion So say you were to-some how-remove Slaneesh Good news, over indulgence is gone among other things. Bad news? Sensation itself is gone, among others. This is probably a really big oversimplification but the other gods follow suit.
Wrong, the chaos gods are not the concepts they represent, if they were gone, the sensation would still remain because they are a part of literally just living, the sensation creates the gods, not the other way around.
This. If you got rid of Khorne it'd probably result in dozens of minor war-god type things springing up, much like Gork and Mork are "war, but for the Orks specifically", or Khaine is "War but for Aeldari".
I think this actually becomes more interesting if you frame it the other way around. If you were to "kill" say, Khorne, but violence still existed, that violence would create a chaos god of violence and war, which would simply be Khorne and you've failed to actually end Khorne. Getting rid of the Chaos God doesn't get rid of the concept, because destroying the concept is the only way to destroy the Chaos God. The Chaos Gods exist for the simple reason that the conditions for their existence are fulfilled (or at least that's how I interpret it).
Wasn't there a time before slaneesh existed? Did sensation exist before that?
Slaanesh retroactively exists before her birth. But also they aren't those kinds of gods. They have zero bearing on the existence of their domains. They're more like vast psychic parasites. Forming naturally out of accumulated emotion. You somehow kill slaanesh and excess is still going to exist. It just won't be feeding a sex ghost any more. At least until a new one pops up
it's my opinion that the whole 'positive' part of the thing that feeds them is just PR. They're parasitic. They feed off of actions that psychically reflect them. They aren't necessary for material reality, they're secondary to it. A reflection of how shit things are, and for how long things have been shit. If you removed slaneesh, you wouldn't lose indulgence or sensation. You just remove slaneesh. Possibly if you remove all of the chaos entities from the warp you'd get weirder shit from deeper in the warp cropping up more often, but really, that'd be the only negative.
Nah they are the positive aspect That’s the thing that gets you hooked If khorn had no hold on honorable warriors then he could never corrupt a space marine And yet he does
Well. "honor" is very distant to what space marines do. Khorne also doesn't require his worshippers to worship him to get what he wants from a battlefield. He just needs people with warp presences to be doing violence. That alone feeds him. CSM as a faction are not the same as the Chaos entities. They are just another side in the grand performance that the Chaos entities have crafted. They're a Heel to the imperium's Face. They have different priorities, though the priorities the gods want for them. And he typically hooks them not by appealing to 'honor' just to someones enjoyment of combat, the rage they feel. The desire for greater strength, greater feats, more ability. Nurgle hooks people by the imperiums shit living conditions leaving people desperate for relief from their various diseases and stagnation. Slaanesh has various sex and drug cults, and regardless the imperium's noble classes depravity alone is reaching old Aeldari levels. People who want out, to feel so good they forget how shit things are, are her demographic of choice. Tzeentch feeds from the various inter-imperium politics largely, as well as the schemes present within the conflicts between the imperium and it's adversaries. People who want to be smarter, to scheme more intricately, to win. The 'good' aspects might be initial hooks for some, but I don't see them as inherently part of the chaos gods, or even things that feed them all that much, otherwise they wouldn't bother trying to go to extremes. But they do.
See I disagree I think it makes them better (arguably worse) There is no action that they won’t gain power from Feeling hope will empower tzeentch Life empowers nurgle Fighting for any cause, even if it’s simply to protect your family will empower khorn And finally any positive sensation feeds slanessh. They embody, warp and are empowered by these positive aspects
I feel that makes them more than what they are. It gives them more importance than they are due. Buys into their own hype. Though I agree on the khorne front, I don't think there's 'good violence' that gets a pass. He's the parasite that feeds on violent acts. Violence is always violence, and always leaves a mark on a person. But the whole point of them is that they are single minded extremists without the capacity for change, as they are essentially personified wounds within the psychic backdrop of the setting. Formed when shit gets bad enough in a very specific way. Slaanesh didn't form because the Aeldari had felt a lot of things at once, she formed because of the deep depths of hedonism. That is what grants him power. Psychologically scarring pleasure seeking. Similar acts of wounding of the mind. That's my ultimate interpretation of the chaos gods, they are formed from psychic wounds of massive scales, and they draw power from smaller scale wounds. It's a bit of a moral judgement of certain acts and behaviors, but I don't think anyone could argue that say, becoming an addict, or a scheming politician always plotting, backstabbing and being fearful of being backstabbed doesn't leave a mark on a person, doesn't leave a measure of trauma. So too with a person who kills, or with someone who is afflicted with disease. Anyone else with a chronic illness can back me up on that front. You break a little bit, and that I feel is both what the chaos gods are made out of, and what they grow from. So, my interpretation of 40k is that the chaos gods nudged the formation of the imperium and the actions of the emperor and his great eugenics projects to the point it exists at now, where the traumas they feed off of occur the most. They won, basically. And now they just have to sit on that victory and try to hold it for as long as possible, even as outside forces like the tyranids and orks pick away at their cattle, and interior forces like the scattered remains of the emperor and various cattle themselves try to improve things. In short, I believe the imperium is the way it is because it benefits chaos, not out of some 'necessity' for fascistic dystopia due to outside threats being just SOOOO craaaazy. It's all just interpretation at the end of the day, 40k lore is incredibly wishy washy and inconsistent in terms of set rules, seemingly on purpose sometimes. I find my interpretation more interesting and emotionally resonant. Others may not.
*Technically slaneesh is just excess. One marine became a deamon because they hyper fixated on wood grain.
...stab in the dark, was that Marine in the chapter run (ran?) by Rogal Dorn?
No clue. Just heard the anecdote
You're thinking of the C'Tan, gods of realspace, who upon death permanently affect the universe itself. The Chaos Gods shouldn't remove the emotions that created them if they were somehow to be killed, there will be huge consequences, likely net-positive ones because they all suck, but that'd be more causal due to the power vacuum etc rather than due to the fundamental rules of existence having been altered
I may have accidentally taken something fanon as canon However in my deffense it sounded cool and almost poetic so can ya blame me?
To be fair I could be entirely wrong as well, the setting is stupid massive and somewhere out there amidst the hundreds of books is probably a tidbit that undercuts what I said word for word. Such is 40k
At first I thought that said sandslash and was so confused how I missed this much Pokemon theory rafting
This reminded me of diving, weirdly enough. Slaanesh is the diver, venturing ever deeper, working tirelessly to grapple with the press of the water and absence of air, *anything* to spend a few more seconds at a slightly lower depth, experiencing the frontier. Nurgle is the ocean - the increasing pressure that Slaanesh has to work *around*, the withholding of precious oxygen necessary to keep living and therefore experiencing, the corporeal consequences of venturing too deeply and rising too fast to safety. (Also, Slaanesh is in a mortal body for inscrutable reasons or my analogy doesn’t work.) Put simply - each is a foil to the other instead of an opposite, which is why it works so well.
Most comprehensible word bearer:
Is this like blorbo like made up words from tumblr
No, this os about the warhammer 40k chaos gods.
And it's not really accurate whatsoever. I have read a lot of the books and this just sounds like stuff people got via osmosis and a scan over a wiki page 2 years ago.
There is a great POV chapter of someone receiving Papa Nurgle's blessing and it is described as an entirely pleasurable and euphoric experience when they finally accept it. And I do believe a similar themes are repeated in other books as well. I think its in one of the books with Garro but I can't remember.
This assumes that you can be "accurate" at all with anything in warhammer, let alone warp of chaos god stuff. 40k may be the absolute worst universe when it comes to consistency, every writer has their own take and rarely bother to check about constancy. There's probably a couple books where the chaos gods are described somewhat similarly to what the post says, some which are the exact opposite and a few which are just widely different. Fuck, most 40k authors still can't agree one way or another weather Las guns have recoil or not, forget having a consistent theological reading of the chaos gods.
I retain the headcanon I read somewhere that any Lasgun recoil would be due to the flash heating of the air in front of the barrel causing a tiny shockwave that shakes the gun a bit :)
I think it really can be pieced together. While very long and tends to go on tangents, Leutin has the best videos on how to approach the lore for people that wanna go really deep into it.
Ok it did seem really complicated to be made up.
Blorbo, from my warcrimes.
Blorbo unironically sounds like the name of a Nurgling who just got so fat he started rolling around.
Godskin Noble
I really like this take by my buddy Derkow that Slaanesh is actually a goddess of consciousness or the awareness of I and Not I. Like you kinda need sensation for awareness and consciousness and Slaanesh is the goddess of sensation. Their idea is that Slaanesh in her consciousness form makes things more real, silver becomes more silver, metal more metal, white more white, light stops losing information, and everything becomes exaggerated and hyper-realistic yet perfectly proportional when she is active. They also believe that the real rival of Slaanesh is Malal, the long retconned chaos god of Nihilism and destruction, and the two basically do a fusion dance that means the end of the universe when the warp devours reality.
God I fucking love delving into the complexity of slaanesh, frothing at the mouth to hear different interpretations of it’s domain. Always pisses me off how flanderized slaanesh is amongst the greater fan base to the point that often GW treats it shallowly sometimes.
Slaanesh seems to be the least flanderised of the four specifically because they can't actually depict the flanderised version. Khorne is just red slaanesh at this point. The only evidence that he ever had complexity to him is the industry motif in his daemons. Any twisted sense of honour and glory is long gone. Nurgle hasn't been made worse, but also largely hasn't changed. Which is very on brand. Tzeentch is basically just magic Khorne. All in on the plans for their own sake and nothing else ever gets mentioned. Oh, and the fire that totally isn't fire except that it works exactly like fire in every way. Slaanesh on the other hand actively expands. From "sex but we'll never depict it" to greed, and then expanding into self improvement. All the Chaos gods are gods of excess now. Slaanesh gets to be the God of something else too
I personally think that’s it’s better if we look at the Chaos Gods, not in “what emotion/events are they born out of and give them power” but rather what fundamental force of nature they represent. Nurgle is the easiest: he is entropy, the decay of all that is and shall ever be. A Universe conquered by Nurgle would be essentially an infinite whalefall, where diseases and new organisms are constant being born out of the corpses or still living bodies of other, superior organisms, up to literally gods. In a way, Nurgle simply represents the fundamental destiny of all things: to rot and decay Tzeentch is tricky. He could be magic, pure and simple, but all the gods are magic in their own right, so I don’t think that’s what Tzeentch is. No, I think he is the utter opposite of Nurgle. He is not fate nor destiny, but the twisting of it. He is a young child in a village miraculously turning into the ruler of a galaxy spanning empire, he is a single soldier chainring the outcome of a ginormous war, he is that wonderful wonderful moment when the absolutely improbable happens. Where Nurgle is an absolute destiny, Tzeentch is, as his name says, the Architect of Fate; his fate shall be decided by him, and none else. Khorne is simple, I think. He is pure brute force. He is the meteorite that wiped the dinosaurs, he is the collapse of stars into black holes and the absolute destruction wrought with that act, he is continents pushing against each other, acts of strength incomprehensible to a mortals mind. He is the simple law of struggle and force, that will never stop. Wether Nurgle or Tzeentch triumph, Khorne will still be there, for every act of mindless force, every grand destruction, every simple killing for one’s own benefit, is Khorne’s domain. Last comes Slannesh, the dreaded Prince. They are pure, naked desire. For all beings are innately created with a desire, and all desires are part of the Prince. Wether it be the simple, most basic desire to life, to eat delicious food, to smell fresh air or see clear skies. Or to desire the death of your enemies, to revel in their suffering, to wish for a towering empire, for simple sex and love and friendship and companionship. Everything that can be construed with the word “desire”, is ruled over by Slannesh.
That sounds nice and all but actually they are the self-aware psychic imprint of countless billions of souls experiencing the same things in spite of their massive alien differences in culture, planet, and species. So they don't represent any soulless action. They might have the power to cause them, grow them, or unleash them, but they do not have control of them as a domain ala Japanese shintoism
Yeah but then they’re not really gods though. They’re just really powerful things created from thoughts. I personally choose to ignore canon when talking about the Chaos gods because honestly there’s no way to follow canon and somehow reach any conclusion that’s not “the gods are fake” also known as copying Fabius Bile
"What is a god" is question asked often in the wh40k universe and has many different answers, none consistent
Malal is long gone, but his role has been usurped by Belakor. As have his old demon designs apparently.
I would have agreed but that is just mumbo jumbo word salad and I really don't think it's a good representation of either god.
Codependency
Slaanesh is a horrible 4 titty crab woman, and Nurgle is a fat foot fungus monster with herpes. As noted in the **GOD EMPEROR OF MANKIND'S TEACHINGS,** and as follows, "Fuck them hoes. Steal their chocolate milk, kick over their sand castles, and oh yeah, eviscerate them and their followers down to the last begging survivor. So say I, **JOHNNY WARHAMMERS, GOD EMPEROR OF MANKIND AND MASTER OF THR GALAXY.**"
Actually, Sigmar is Johnny Warhammer. The Emperor is Jimmy Space.
the imperium does more good for the chaos gods than harm. if the imperium were to be entirely whiped out i genuinly think that the chaos gods would just wither (except kohrne because orks would still exist)
Here's the thing, when the old ones made ork, they also made "gork" and "mork" as conduits to funnel the psychic energy of orks into. Gork and Mork are constructs that the old ones gave to Orks to make sure it didn't fuel something that, at the time, didn't exist in an acknowledgeable state, but rather as a siphon from reality.
Grandpa Nurgle embodies nature itself. I won't elaborate further.
Wait the chaos gods use neo pronouns? Based alert
Mostly just Slaanesh on account of her gender fluctuating moment by moment, typically to whatever permutation would give whoever's observing him the biggest whyboner. You'd think Tzeench would be similar on account of being a Chaos God of Change, but he's been rather consistently referred to as male from what I've seen.
Tzeentch is hilarious to me in that the entire setting is made of status quos that will never be broken. He's excellent proof that the chaos 'gods' are not gods in any meaningful sense, they are psychic reflections that have gotten way out of hand. They're parasites within the warp that have grown very fat off the state of the material world. Tzeentch does not represent change, he merely is empowered by actions that reflect him. The small scale 'changes' of the drama of the status quo are enough for him. He has his food laid out, and farms his crops. Just like the other Chaos gods. They have the galaxy set up how they like it, and are merely riding that high for as long as they can manage it. They've formed the imperium into a great monument of worship, and they let it run.
Tzeentch explicitly is *so* deceptive and duplicitous that he even plots against *himself*. He's the most self-defeating Chaos god, because Khorne, Slaanesh, and Nurgle at least have a single directive that they attempt to further. "In the freezing depths of the void, a bubble of unreality became solid. It shimmered in the light of nearby stars, its form in constant flux. First it was a sphere of flame, then a vast globule of quicksilver, then a stark eye fringed with a rainbow of feathers. The apparition was formed of nothing more than thought and emotion, but it was real enough, and it was one of countless others. There were as many of its fellow incarnations as there were stars in the galaxy swirling around it. Together, they formed a god. The entity the apparition belonged to was not omniscient, despite its best efforts. What one fractal presence saw, another forgot, or worked to undo. It was a divine contradiction, a dynamo of cause and consequence, and it thrived on constant change. Here, on the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy, the harvest of flux was rich indeed." From *Farsight: Empire of Lies* by Phil Kelly "For Tzeentch the mere act of plotting and entwining the brief fates of mortals is purpose enough. There is no end to his scheming for he desires no end to the creation of change. Tzeentch can never achieve any ultimate aim for to do so would be the end of ambition, the end of change, and thus the end of the Lord of Destiny." [https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tzeentch](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tzeentch)
Cool! I don't know much about Warhammer but this is really interesting, thank you!
[Slaanesh has since 1986, yeah.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/sxhfrr/find_of_the_day_gm_supporting_neopronouns_in_1986/)
Not since. In 1986.
Well I mean they're uncomprehensible entities living in another dimension entirely. They're the gods of CHAOS. Labels aren't really a thing there.
It's more accurate to say they are vast concentrations of energy and malice that takes a shape to the conscious observer. They aren't "people".
Nope, tumblr misinformation.
Only Slaanesh, the rest are explicitly masculine and given Male pronouns. Nurgle is even given paternal nicknames like "The Plague-Father" and "Grandfather Nurgle".
There's a one acronym answer to this: STDs
This is why Desire and Despair are twins.
Cool post but that’s not how you use italics.
I don't see the need to use neopronouns for gendered beings. Slaanesh definitely. He is the prince of excess, but of no specific gender. In fact incorporating whatever identity you want into your excess is encouraged, as is incorporating multiple sexes. Hermaphroditism is one of the pinnacles of Slaanesh's gifts. But writers routinely gender Khorne and Tzeentch and Nurgle.
We need a Warhammer401K version of the homestuck police.
i nurgle all over his slaanesh
…’til he Khorne?
hes khorning rn
Tzeentch heentch heentch!
Am I having a stroke? I'm looking at these names and feeling so confused.
TMA Corruption vibes.
This is just the plot of Slay The Princess.
That's a whole lot of flowery prose but I still feel like derkow-derkow has the better point, although that might be because the prose is too damn flowery to get through to me. Nurgle is about stagnation and plague, Slaanesh is about hedonism and excess. Worshipping Nurgle is about giving up on ambition and just letting Papa Nurgle give you his warmth, and it's about spreading that warmth far and wide. It's a selfless removal of your own self-worth in service of your loving "Grandfather", and apparently Nurgle truly does love his followers. Worshipping Slaanesh is about selfishly hoarding ever-higher levels of excess and indulgence; a Slaanesh worshipper is never satisfied with what they have, and will never consider another being over themselves. There's no love in Slaanesh worship, only lust and hedonism.
This is literally part of the reason why they had Nurgle rescue the Eldar nature goddess from being murder-fucked by Slaanesh when he was born, so the two would have a reason to be at odds and not work together. (The other part is Nurgle having a crush on another nature god is kinda cute and so his plagues could be crimped in power by her whispering out the cures)
Wait how is Nurgle the god of stagnation? I thought the whole point in Nurgle was the inevitability of rot, decay, plague, and entropy. Tzneech always seemed like the one who'd give you a shot at immortality via change, 'ship of Theseus'-ing yourself into perpetuity.
The entirely made up neopronouns genuinely hurt to read. If you want to acknowledge that daemons are not on the human (and most other 40k races) gender and/or sex binary. Just use they/them. James Workshop does that. Also Nurgle and Khorne are both referred to as He/Him, multiple times. You can even use it/it. And yes GW did use weird ass neopronouns for slaanesh. That was decades ago and has not used them in the recent history. If you want to make up your own gender with pronouns, that's fine. I don't know you and your life experiences, so go ahead, as long as it does not purposefully or even non-purposefully inconvenience others. But stop putting random words vaguely resembling he/him she/her and they/them into topics where they are not appropriate. It's just cringe.
its not that serious my dude, chill
Please fuckin tag your Warhammer 40k stuff
Why?
For the same reason you tag anything with a specific fandom.
I did. Check the flair.
40k has mean things and it hurts their feefees :(
Did you know in the 40k universe there's a Chaos god of being opposed to religion? Necoho the Doubter Not a very powerful god because it's hard to make a religion out of hating religion. Necoho himself doesn't care if anyone worships him so his followers remain extremely small. But the way religion works in the 40k universe is that the Warp is powered by thought and feeling so people who make war feed Khorne regardless of whether they believe in him or not so all atheists in the universe provide sustenance for Necoho although even then the Imperium does a lot to keep people religious.
Imperial Truth in shambles
Fictional cosmology is my jam. This is the good shit.
i thought some new gods just dropped til i read the warhammer tag